Biography
Sutherland's father was from New Zealand; his mother was from Scotland. His family moved to Wilmette, Illinois, then Scarsdale, New York, for his father's career. Bert Sutherland was his elder brother. Ivan Sutherland earned his bachelor's degree in electrical engineering from the Carnegie Institute of Technology, his master's degree from Caltech, and his Ph.D. from MIT in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, EECS in 1963. Sutherland invented Sketchpad in 1962 while at MIT. Claude Shannon signed on to supervise Sutherland's computer drawing thesis. Among others on his thesis committee were Marvin Minsky and Steven Coons. Sketchpad was an innovative program that influenced alternative forms of interaction with computers. Sketchpad could accept constraints and specified relationships among segments and arcs, including the diameter of arcs. It could draw both horizontal and vertical lines and combine them into figures and shapes. Figures could be copied, moved, rotated, or resized, retaining their basic properties. Sketchpad also had the first window-drawing program and clipping algorithm, which allowed zooming. Sketchpad ran on the Lincoln TX-2 computer and influenced Douglas Engelbart's NLS (computer system), oN-Line System. Sketchpad, in turn, was influenced by the conceptual Memex as envisioned by Vannevar Bush in his influential paper "As We May Think". Sutherland replaced J. C. R. Licklider as the head of the US Defense Department DARPA, Advanced Research Project Agency's Information Processing Techniques Office (IPTO), when Licklider took a job at IBM in 1964. From 1965 to 1968, Sutherland was an associate professor of electrical engineering at Harvard University. Work with student Danny Cohen (engineer), Danny Cohen in 1967 led to the development of the Cohen–Sutherland computer graphics line clipping algorithm. In 1968, with his students Bob Sproull, Quintin Foster, Danny Cohen (engineer), Danny Cohen, and others he created the first head-mounted display that rendered images for the viewer's changing pose, as sensed by The Sword of Damocles (virtual reality), The Sword of Damocles, thus making the first virtual reality system. A prior system, Sensorama, used a Head Mounted Display, head-mounted display to play back static video and other sensory stimuli. The optical see-through head-mounted display used in Sutherland's VR system was a stock item used by U.S. military helicopter pilots to view video from cameras mounted on the helicopter's belly. From 1968 to 1974, Sutherland was a professor at the University of Utah. Among his students there were Alan Kay, inventor of the Smalltalk language, Gordon W. Romney (computer and cybersecurity scientist), who rendered the first 3D images at U of U, Henri Gouraud (computer scientist), Henri Gouraud, who devised the Gouraud shading technique, Franklin C. Crow, Frank Crow, who went on to develop Spatial anti-aliasing, antialiasing methods, Jim Clark, founder of Silicon Graphics, Henry Fuchs, and Edwin Catmull, co-founder of Pixar and now president of Walt Disney Feature Animation, Walt Disney and Pixar Animation Studios. In 1968 he co-founded Evans & Sutherland with his friend and colleague David C. Evans. The company did pioneering work in the field of real-time hardware, accelerated 3D computer graphics, and Computer printer, printer languages. Former employees of Evans & Sutherland included the future founders of Adobe Systems, Adobe (John Warnock) and Silicon Graphics (James H. Clark, Jim Clark). From 1974 to 1978 he was the Fletcher Jones (American entrepreneur), Fletcher Jones Professor of Computer Science at California Institute of Technology, where he was the founding head of that school's computer science department. He then founded a consulting firm, Sutherland, Sproull and Associates, which was purchased by Sun Microsystems to form the seed of its research division, Sun Labs. Sutherland was a fellow and vice president at Sun Microsystems. Sutherland was a visiting scholar in the computer science division at University of California, Berkeley (fall 2005 – spring 2008). On May 28, 2006, Ivan Sutherland married Marly Roncken. Sutherland and Marly Roncken are leading the research in Asynchronous Systems at Portland State University. He has two children. His elder brother, Bert Sutherland, was also a computer science researcher.Awards
* Computer History Museum Fellow "for the Sketchpad computer-aided design system and for lifelong contributions to computer graphics and education," 2005 * R&D 100 Award, 2004 (team)R&D 100Quotes
* "A display connected to a digital computer gives us a chance to gain familiarity with concepts not realizable in the physical world. It is a looking glass into a mathematical wonderland." * "The ultimate display would, of course, be a room within which the computer can control the existence of matter. A chair displayed in such a room would be good enough to sit in. Handcuffs displayed in such a room would be confining, and a bullet displayed in such a room would be fatal." * When asked: "How could you possibly have done the first interactive graphics program, the first non-procedural programming language, the first object oriented software system, all in one year?", Sutherland replied: "Well, I didn't know it was hard." * "It’s not an idea until you write it down." * "Without the fun, none of us would go on!"Patents
Sutherland has more than 60 patents, including:Publications
See also
* List of pioneers in computer scienceReferences
External links
* {{DEFAULTSORT:Sutherland, Ivan American computer scientists American software engineers 1938 births Living people Computer graphics professionals Computer graphics researchers Internet pioneers Virtual reality pioneers Engineers from California Scientists from California Fellows of the Association for Computing Machinery Members of the United States National Academy of Engineering Members of the United States National Academy of Sciences Sun Microsystems people Turing Award laureates California Institute of Technology faculty Harvard University faculty University of Utah faculty California Institute of Technology alumni Carnegie Mellon University College of Engineering alumni Scarsdale High School alumni People from Hastings, Nebraska People from Scarsdale, New York 20th-century American engineers 21st-century American engineers 20th-century American scientists 21st-century American scientists Scientists from New York (state) American people of Scottish descent Engineers from New York (state) Engineers from Nebraska American people of New Zealand descent UC Berkeley College of Engineering faculty Kyoto laureates in Advanced Technology Inventors from Nebraska